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The Simple View of Reading Made Complex by Morphological Decoding Fluency in Bilingual Fourth‐Grade Readers of English
Author(s) -
Zhang Dongbo,
Ke Sihui
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
reading research quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.162
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1936-2722
pISSN - 0034-0553
DOI - 10.1002/rrq.287
Subject(s) - malay , fluency , linguistics , vocabulary , reading comprehension , reading (process) , psychology , decoding methods , computer science , mathematics education , telecommunications , philosophy
The authors examined the complexity of the simple view of reading, focusing on morphological decoding fluency in fourth‐grade readers of English in Singapore. The participants were three groups of students who all learned to become bilingual and biliterate in the English language ( EL ) and their respective ethnic language in school but differed in the home language they used. The first group was ethnic Chinese students who used English as the dominant home language (Chinese EL 1); the other two groups were ethnic Chinese and Malay students whose dominant home language was not English but Chinese (Chinese EL 2) and Malay (Malay EL 2), respectively. The measures included pseudoword decoding (phonemic decoding), timed decoding of derivational words (morphological decoding fluency), oral vocabulary, and passage comprehension. Path analysis showed that oral vocabulary significantly predicted reading comprehension across all three groups, yet a significant effect of morphological decoding fluency surfaced in the Chinese EL 1 and Malay EL 2 groups but not the Chinese EL 2 group. Multigroup path analysis and commonality analysis further confirmed that morphological decoding played a larger role in the Chinese EL 1 and Malay EL 2 groups. These findings are discussed in light of the joint influence of target‐language experience and cross‐linguistic influence on second‐language or bilingual reading development.